Latest On Artistic Stops

I found out the other day that the opening of Art in Motion's latest bus stop at Newtown Pike and Ash St. is set for August 31. Called the Bluegrass Stop, it sits across Newtown from the Lexington Health Department building and is the third in a growing set of designed bus stops in Fayette County.

I visited Art in Motion's website for details on the opening and some of their next projects only to find that it has not been updated since late March.

So far they have built the Bottlestop (on Versailles Rd), Artstop (at Elm Tree Lane and E Third St), and Bluegrass stop(Newtown and Ash) with the Gardenstop under construction at Euclid and Linden Walk. Other than this there is no information on their site.

Here is what I do know about their future plans. The conversations for a stop near the Good Foods Co-op on Southland Dr are progressing well and a location for a stop in front of the Fayette County Schools Central Office has been set. I have not heard of either having a design settled upon and hope that they will have another competition for one or both. The Central Office stop will have space for revolving displays of student art and achievements.

I know that the local high schools have some advanced engineering or design classes and hopefully that can be enticed to submit some basic concepts from which the professionals can finish the design. Perhaps the School Board will take this suggestion into consideration.

I am also hopeful the the solar collector vs metered electrical lighting situation will be resolved.

Art Style Bus Shelter Updates

If my information is correct, and I have every reason to believe that it is, we should see the art style shelter planned for Newtown Pike coming alive very soon.

They have their design, they have a location, they have $30,000 in pledges from Lextran and others and they have a (probably self imposed) deadline of before the World Equestrian Games. So I have a feeling that we will see something in the near future.

Art In Motion should be in the process of reviewing the entries of the design competition for the shelter to be built in Aylesford (behind the King Alumni House) and the winner is supposed to be announced on April 14.

The buzz that I hear is very positive about other potential locations. The developers of the Hamburg development, I think, are looking a multiple locations and I would guess that they will be in a common theme. My bet would be an equestrian theme as all the street names are horse related.

I spoke with someone from the Southland Drive area the other day and learned that they have been mulling the idea for over a year. With both the Good Foods Co-op renovation and the continued success of the Sunday farmers market, either location would make a nice site. The Southland portion of the bus route has also proved to be a winner for Lextran.

There are other interested parties and suggested locations being bandied about and I am starting to feel that this could begin to overwhelm this small group. I don't see any reason to prevent another similar organization from also supporting Lextran in like fashion, but there should be a central coordinating panel, free of politics and its infighting to help spread the wealth.

Lexington could soon have a good number of clean, well lit, art style shelters and the Lextran riders (as well as the neighbors) will benefit.

I Still Support Art In Motion

I attended the fund raiser for Art in Motion last Thursday night, along with Mrs. Sweeper, as it afforded me the opportunity meet some of the people that I have posted about for a while. Or so I thought.

The location was Natasha’s Bistro and Bar on the Esplanade, time, from 5:30 till 10:00, a great chance for us to meet and greet other AiM supporters. Maybe even exchange some ideas. We arrived at about 6, just enough to not be the first in the door but still have some time the entertainment for the evening.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. By 6 o’clock the opening band was rocking the joint, and I mean rocking it. We heard them from the corner of Main St. There was no time for casual conversation with others, no introductions, no quiet time for mingling. Take your money at the door, hustle you to a table and we were on our own.

The band, Positive Movement, was playing some modern jazz or blues which the Mrs. and I enjoy on a regular basis during the summer, but this was just a bit too loud for the occasion. I couldn’t hear the waitress or my wife so we reverted to the primitive form of texting, passing notes to each other across the table.

Relatives of the band members or members of the main band, Water with Vera Soules, took up positions right in front of the stage and took snapshots and video of the performance while others kept to the periphery and ordered dinner.

We watched the slide show of a variety of art stops from around the world and marveled at the creativity of them. We watched the slide show of the sculptor of the Third St Artstop as he described how he did it. We heard reference to the major participants of the existing structures, but none of them were introduced. I felt a little bit lost.

Dinner over, and the slide shows behind us, little was left to keep us there, as apparently was the case with a majority of the others in the room, so we left. Two members of the MPO staff and the table with the EOP people had all left. I saw nobody from Lextran that I knew and I now know just one more person with Art in Motion.

Don’t think for a moment that this diminishes my enthusiasm for the Art in Motion program or for art stops in general. I will continue to post about them and continue to support their construction. I even anticipate being at a fundraiser in the near future, which I hear will be at Buster’s, and I am told that it will be more along the lines of what I expected last week.

Friday night we went to the Patriotic Concert at Transylvania as we always do. On the way we passed the corner of Third and Elm Tree Ln.

This is what the art stop looked like around noon on Thursday and below is a rendering of the completed project.

Of all the project that I have blogged about along this corridor, this is probably the most exciting and the first one to be underway(and its well on its way to completion).

The sculpture (seen below) to be placed near the corner of the two streets is interesting and colorful. I hope to have some information on the sculptor in the next day or so, so stay tuned.
The Urban County Council approved a business plan for the Lyric across the street and have a construction supervisor in place so that work can begin there soon. This section of Third St is beginning to move in the right direction. And as a gentleman I spoke to last Thursday said "If we can keep the homeless from sleeping in the bus stop and graffiti off the art work, this will be real nice".

I think that this will be real nice indeed.

The Case For Solar Power in Downtown Lexington

I read several days ago about San Francisco's first solar bus shelter. It seems to me that a city as advanced as San Francisco would have done this already. I have seen reports from other cities and their efforts to add signage and notice boards announcing the next bus using some radio and tracking system. These things take power and solar just seems like the thing to supply it.

Lexington's new parking meter system uses solar collectors to power the units, but I suppose that they are running on very low voltage, yet they operate year round.

The one real nice thing that I liked about the San Francisco shelter was the ability to feed into the regular power grid. Just think of the usage of the technology on an "art style" bus stop in Lexington. Oh wait, they did include a solar panel for the Bottle Stop location so as to make it a really green project. The Newtown Pike shelter is also to be solar powered.

When these individual projects are designed as stand alone shelters and off the grid, then the solar panels are scaled to the needs of the stop itself. Now if these are to be a series of stops as needed for say the downtown circulator or some themed area such as Hamburg, as I have posted of before, then the solar collectors could be incorporated into more of the shelter's surface (a la San Francisco's).

By incorporating these series of shelters into the electrical grid the city could help these stops pay for themselves. I understand that in doing so there would have to be a meter through which to connect and for which there is a minimum monthly charge, but that could be offset by what the solar panel feeds back into the grid. This is one more way that the City could show encouragement for a green initiative.

But wait a minute, just what are those green initiatives that the City is working on? A check of the LFUCG website shows that they want to take their buildings green, although they have left out adding solar panels or wind generators for the building roofs.

A new stadium in Taiwan is being built that will supply 100% of its needed power from solar with enough left over to add to the grid to take care of 80% of the neighboring area's needs. The roof of Rupp Arena at Lexington Center is easily the largest area of rooftop in the downtown district and could easily accomodate an array of solar panels to offset the power needs of the arena. And if another arena is built, then there is another roof space.

Each and every tall building in the urban area has updrafts and wind currents that could be used as a source of wind power and while they may not meet all the power requirements of the individual building they could put a dent in the utility bill, if not the carbon footprint.

There is so much else that can be done, so why don't you tell me some of your ideas?

Art Style Bus Stop Progress

Back in January I wrote about some ideas for the seemingly growing, interest in bus stops done up in a designer style, so called art stops. In that post I gave some examples of places and possible design themes, and although nobody gave any responses, I know that they were read and discussed somewhere. Again at the first of this month, I posted about the coming art stop at Third and Elm Tree Lane.

Now I hear that there is dissension in the ranks of those behind the art stops, Art in Motion, and those artists who could be the future designers of the art stops.

In my mind there is a sufficient amount of work for the number of artists and designers in Lexington. This should be looked at as an on-going civic program. One that adds a number of art stops a year, maybe not more than ten or so, based on available funding. There could be some kind of competition with categories for veteran and novice artists. Points could be awarded for designs that fit best with its location, or for enhancing or emboldening the location. These are elements that will come in time as the program grows beyond its baby steps.

As I see it we have a pretty good first step and some likely slippery ground to cover before we can run with this thing. What we don't need is a lot of mud slinging and raining on everybody's parades.

Art on E. Third St

Last week I attended the kick off party for the Issac Murphy Memorial Art Garden. This garden will be located at the intersection of E Third St and Midland Ave. This garden is dedicated to the memory of probably the finest jockeys of his, of maybe even all time. Murphy's skills on the race track are legendary.

The Art Garden is situated between the iconic Thoroughbred Park and the site of the old Kentucky Association race track, in an area that would now be known as "the backside", an area that jockeys know well. There will be space for both passive and performing art to be displayed and an interactive wall of art and information.

It is also the starting point for the Legacy Bike trail, to be built as a legacy project for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games. This trail will wind through town, out Newtown Pike, past the Coldstream Research Park and on to the Kentucky Horse Park. Along the way the trail will pass the Lyric Theater on the corner of Third and Elm Tree Lane, and another long awaited addition to the cultural scene of downtown and the East End. Funding for the construction is in place but operational support is being raised.

So much for the "big ticket "items. Also on the horizon is the latest "art style" bus shelter, or art stop. Diagonally across from the Lyric, on a sliver of property between Elm Tree and the Episcopal Cemetery, will soon rise Lexington's newest art stop.

Art in Motion, as I understand it, has received funding and has a preliminary design(the same guys that did the Newtown Pike shelter) and needs to have a substantial portion of the work completed by the end of June. From the sketch that I've seen, with a few tweaks here and there, it is going to be a great artistic addition to E Third St.

On the other side of the block from this location, at the Living Arts and Science Center, they have started receiving the next batch of Horse Mania statues for the summer of 2010. I wonder if they have thought about placing some of these along the Legacy Bike trail.

This should be only the start for art on E Third St.

Lexington Developments--Feb 2009

For those of you who follow my postings on Skyscraper City this may be nothing new, but I hope to give a little background for this weeks developments.

First off, there is the progress around the Medical Center ,and this time it's private money. The property between the Shell station and the new parking garage will soon break ground for a seven story hotel. I've been told that it will be Hampton Inn and the latest plan shows awnings or canopies protruding over the sidewalk, like they want to do a sidewalk style dining area.

This development is much different from that proposed many years ago. The first proposal for this site was dated Jan. 12, 1967. At that time they called it White Towers because the proposal was for two apartment towers of 9 floors each, above a parking structure which would cover the entire block. The engineering firm of Proctor, Davis & Ray owned and occupied the light colored building to the right of the photo above, had options to purchase the rest of the block and prepared the plans.

P,D & R's primary field was water and sewer projects with some aviation work and the project languished. They applied for and received their R-5 zoning, but I guess the options expired and others started acquiring the small residential lots. The Medical School students needed inexpensive apartments close to the hospital and between the Walton brothers and Henry Cravens that need was met.

When the University began accumulating property in the area, a revised plan for more of a mixed use project was brought forward. It is theorized that, with an approved plan in place, the owners could maximize their asking price in case of a condemnation by UK. Simultaneously, the need has grown for lodging of families of non-local patients under long term care. This latest plan will now apparently fill a portion of that need. Oddly enough, there was a small motel on the block now occupied by the Kentucky Clinic and Nursing School back in '67.


The other new announcement today was about the Downtown enhancements for the Farmers market and the Streetscape proposals. The images above show just the type of structure I would like to see and is what I had in mind when I posted about a possible entertainment district along Short St between Mill and Cheapside. A light, airy covering of late 1800's style and although this covers Cheapside and not Short, it will fulfill the idea. The possibility of using it for many other functions and events is really a plus. The rendering also seems to show that the Breckenridge statue will be moved toward Main St. and some more public artwork added(also topics of earlier blog posts). The addition of an "art style" bus stop would complete the trifecta.

Some comments on the Herald-Leader web site have called this a waste of money and suggest that it be better suited for the Lexington Mall location. Are these the same folk that raked former Mayor Issac about her foray into a condemnation of said mall and now chastise the current Mayor for not doing the same? Are they the same folk who complain the downtown is not vibrant and will not spend any effort to make it so? Some downtown decisions of the past have been shown to be less than useful and some just plain mistakes. Please, let us learn from those mistakes and move forward but not so rapidly as to make even larger mistakes.

With all the effort looking toward the streetscapes, I would hope that they don't forget the new emphasis on railed transit by the current Federal administration and at least contemplate a possible future rail tram in the downtown area.

Hopefully this next year will find downtown a mess with new building projects galore.

Distinction Setting

The latest Business Lexington is out and has a wonderful piece about the "art style" bus stops. They write:

Our first public art bus shelter radiates with a sort of mesmerizing green glow, but if you have not seen it, it might be because the new shelter is inconspicuously situated along Versailles Road just outside of town.

As you can see, it is a beautiful resting place, out of the elements to wait for the bus. This is a program that I can get behind. The article had a rendering of the, apparently next, art bus stop to be built somewhere along Newtown Pike and the plans filed for the Distillery District show a bus shelter at each of their current project phases. I can't imagine Barry McNeese not desiring to have them in the "art type" for this very creative district.

I have mentioned before the idea of "branding" and bus stops for the Colt circulator. Possibly a design contest among the horse owners and breeders, but why stop there, others of our signature industries/business could sponsor a shelter. Lexington is fortunate to have some unique business entities located here. Those that come to mind are:

Smuckers (The only location to produce Jif peanut butter)
Big Ass Fan Co (A major producer of industrial fans)
Wabasto Sunroof Systems

There are probably more but this is all I could come up with on short notice.

I have heard that a prominent developer is considering designing art stops for their extensive retail and shopping/office park endeavors and having met them before, I believe that it will be done with real class.

And talk about being "shovel ready" projects, some of these will take a little design work but will employ artists and craftsmen for at least a few years.

I wish to thank everyone involved in this distinction setter for Lexington, just let me know how I can help.